1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a stop position determining device for a transport vehicle and further, to a transport vehicle with the device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In open pit mines or the like, a transport vehicle such as a dump truck travels for transporting evacuated ore or earth and sand. The transport vehicle loads the transport object on its vessel (body) at a loading site and transports the loaded transport object to an earth dumping site to perform earth discharging. A bund for restraining the transport vehicle from traveling outside a traveling area is disposed at the earth dumping site. At this time, there arises a case where the transport object on the vessel is discharged outside the bund after the transport vehicle is stopped near the bund.
A technology for stopping a vehicle near a bund is known from Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-90939 for example. This application discloses a technology “that is provided with image pickup means for taking an image in a traveling direction of a vehicle, bird's-eye view conversion means for generating a bird's-eye view image from the taken image, display means for displaying the bird's-eye view image, image analyzing means for calculating the position of a bund from the generated bird's-eye view image, tire position calculation means for calculating the position of tires in the bird's-eye view image, output image preparation means for preparing an output image in which a tire image and a bund position display image are depicted in correspondence to the calculated tire position and the analyzed bund position, and image control means for displaying the output image and the bird's-eye view image with the both images overlapped on the display means” (refer to Abstract).
In discharging the transport object at an earth dumping site of a mine or the like, it is desirable that a transport vehicle be stopped as close to a bund as possible. However, the shapes of bunds vary from mine to mine, and hence, there arises a case where the stop position of the transport vehicle has to be altered in dependence on the shape of the bund. Further, in mines or the like, there arises a case where the shape of a bund is changed in dependence on the operations of the transport vehicle. Therefore, there arises a case where the stop position of the transport vehicle has to be altered with the change in shape of the bund. However, in the aforementioned Japanese application, nothing is taken into consideration about stopping the vehicle close to the bund in dependence on the shape of the bund.
The present invention has been made taking the aforementioned circumstances into consideration, and it is an object of the present invention to make a transport vehicle stop close to a bund in dependence on the shape of the bund.